Overview

You've learned quite a bit about LabVIEW's built-in functions, structures, and variablesnow it's time to examine the potpourri of advanced tools you can use in LabVIEW to make your programming easier and more versatile. By tweaking the numerous environment options, you can customize the appearance and functionality of LabVIEW so it works best for you. You will also learn the VI Property options; for example, how to set up your VI so you can select front panel controls through the keyboard instead of the mouse. We'll look at the powerful VI Server and how you can use it to dynamically control VIs. LabVIEW's numeric types give you the option of representing them as binary, octal, or hexadecimal, as well as decimal representation. In addition, you can include built-in units as part of a numeric variable and allow LabVIEW to perform automatic conversions. You will see how to instantly transform a section of your diagram into a subVI. Finally, LabVIEW has some useful development tools in the Tools menu, such as the Find function, which lets you quickly search for any object, subVI, or text and optionally replace one or all instances with another object, subVI, or text of your choice.

Goals

• Use the Options to customize you LabVIEW environment

• Become familiar with the VI Properties options that allow you to make choices on the appearance and execution of your VI

• Be introduced to the VI Server and what it does

• Learn about VI references and control references

• Become familiar with some properties and methods of the Application class, the VI class, and the Control class

• Understand what a reentrant VI is

• Be able to set up keyboard access of controls

• Learn how to represent numbers with other radices and assign them units

• Create a subVI from a selection of the block diagram

• Discover the utilities under the Tools menu

• Use and create custom probes

• Learn how to Find and Replace objects or text in your VIs